THE MIT PRESS • CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS • LONDON, ENGLAND

MIWON KWON

ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHERSITE-SPECIFIC ART AND LOCATIONAL IDENTITY

© 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Monotype Grotesque and Rockwell by Graphic Composition,Inc., and was printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kwon, Miwon.One place after another : site-specific art and locational identity / Miwon Kwon.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-262-11265-5 (hc. : alk. paper)1. Site-specific art. 2. Art, Modern—20th century. I. Title.

N6490 .K93 2002709’.04’07—dc21 2001044753

At the juncture of Jerome and Gerard avenues and 169th Street in the South Bronx,

across from the 44th Police Precinct building on one side and facing the elevated

subway tracks cutting through the sky on another, is a small piece of no-man’s land.

If not for the conspicuous row of three large concrete cubes flanking one perimeter,

this traffic triangle might remain indistinguishable from other slivers of similarly

odd-shaped, leftover urban spaces found throughout the city. The cubic plinths are,

in fact, the pedestals for three public sculptures by John Ahearn, sponsored by the

Percent for Art program of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Origi-

nally designed to serve as the bases for life-size bronze casts of Raymond Garcia

(and his pit bull, Toby), Corey Mann, and Daleesha—all Ahearn’s neighbors around

Walton Avenue in the Bronx from the mid to late 1980s—the pedestals have re-

mained empty, except for the accumulation of trash and graffiti, for about ten years.

Since September 25, 1991, to be precise, when the artist himself had the sculptures

removed only five days after their installation in response to protests by some resi-

dents and city officials who deemed them inappropriate for the site.1

In downtown Manhattan, at the juncture of Lafayette and Centre streets as

they converge to become Nassau Street, there is another more or less triangular

plot of public land, officially known as Foley Square. Framed by several formidable

government buildings—United States Customs Court, Federal Office Building, New

York County Court House, and United States Court House—the eastern perimeter

of Foley Square faces Federal Plaza. This expansive plaza is populated with a set of

large green mounds, perfect half-spheres that look like grass-covered igloos.

Wrapping around the mounds is a series of serpentine benches, reiterating the cir-

cular form of the mounds and painted a bright apple green. Designed by well-

known landscape architect Martha Schwartz, Federal Plaza today is a playful and

decorative mix of street furniture and natural materials, a clever reworking of tradi-

tional design elements of urban parks. Seen from above, the plaza is an abstract

�

SITINGS OF PUBLIC ART: INTEGRATION VERSUS INTERVENTION

composition in green, with yards of seating rippling through the space like highly

contrived ribbons.

As many will recall, this last site, Federal Plaza, full of dynamic colors and

user-friendly forms today, was once the site of a rancorous and vehement contro-

versy concerning Richard Serra’s steel sculpture Tilted Arc. Commissioned by the

U.S. General Services Administration in 1979 and installed in 1981, the 12-foot-high,

120-foot-long sculpture was removed on March 15, 1989, after five years of public

hearings, lawsuits, and plenty of media coverage concerning the legality and ap-

propriateness of such an action. Now, a little over ten years later, the site has expe-

rienced a complete makeover. Martha Schwartz’s redesign of Federal Plaza has

erased all physical and historical traces of Tilted Arc.

So I begin here, with two “empty” sites of two “failed” public art works. The

forlorn vacancy of the traffic triangle in the South Bronx and the specious pleasant-

ness of Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan bracket this chapter’s consideration

of the problematics of site specificity in the mainstream public art context.2 One

point to stress at the outset is the fact that even though site-specific modes of artis-

tic practice emerged in the mid to late 1960s—roughly coinciding with the incep-

tion of the Art-in-Architecture Program of the General Services Administration

(GSA) in 1963, the Art-in-Public-Places Program of the National Endowment for

the Arts (NEA) in 1967, and numerous local and state Percent for Art programs

throughout the 1960s—it was not until 1974 that concern to promote site-specific

approaches to public art was first registered within the guidelines of these organi-

zations, in particular the NEA. This lag is an initial indication that while the term

“site specificity” might move fluidly through various cultures of artistic practice to-

day—museums, galleries, alternative spaces, international biennials, public art

programs—the history and implications of the term can be profoundly inconsistent

from context to context. Thus, one task of this chapter is to chart the particular tra-

jectory of site specificity within public art as a point of clarification. In particular, I

will argue, the changing conceptualization of site specificity in the public art con-

text indexes the changing criteria by which an art work’s public relevance and its

democratic sociopolitical ambitions have been imagined over the past three

57

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

58

59

< Martha Schwartz, Federal Plaza, New York, 1997–1998. (Photo by Seong H. Kwon.)

> View of South Bronx Sculpture Park site at Jerome and Gerard avenues and 169th Street (44th Precinct Police

Station), c. 1992. (Photo by Nancy Owens.)

decades. Our story will concentrate on Ahearn’s and Serra’s cases to contemplate

the meaningfulness of their respective “empty” sites, especially as they signal the

limits and capacity of site specificity today.

Three distinct paradigms can be identified within the roughly 35-year his-

tory of the modern public art movement in the United States.3 First, there is the art-

in-public-places model exemplified by Alexander Calder’s La Grande Vitesse in

Grand Rapids, Michigan (1967), the first commission to be completed through the

Art-in-Public-Places Program of the NEA. The second paradigm is the art-as-

public-spaces approach, typified by design-oriented urban sculptures of Scott Bur-

ton, Siah Armajani, Mary Miss, Nancy Holt, and others, which function as street

furniture, architectural constructions, or landscaped environments. Finally, there is

the art-in-the-public-interest model, named as such by critic Arlene Raven and

most cogently theorized by artist Suzanne Lacy under the heading of “new genre

public art.”4 Select projects by artists such as John Malpede, Daniel Martinez, Hope

Sandrow, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., and Peggy Diggs, among

many others, are distinguished for foregrounding social issues and political activ-

ism, and/or for engaging “community” collaborations.5

Initially, from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, public art was dominated by

the art-in-public-places paradigm—modernist abstract sculptures that were often

enlarged replicas of works normally found in museums and galleries.6 These art

works were usually signature pieces from internationally established male artists

(favored artists who received the most prominent commissions during this period

include Isamu Noguchi, Henry Moore, and Alexander Calder). In and of them-

selves, they had no distinctive qualities to render them “public” except perhaps

their size and scale.7 What legitimated them as “public” art was quite simply their

siting outdoors or in locations deemed to be public primarily because of their

“openness” and unrestricted physical access—parks, university campuses, civic

centers, entrance areas to federal buildings, plazas off city streets, parking lots, air-

ports.

In the early 1970s, Henry Moore spoke of his relative indifference to the site,

a position that is representative of many (though not all) artists working in the art-in-

60

61

Alexander Calder, La Grande Vitesse, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1967. (Photo courtesy of Grand Rapids City Hall.)

62

Isamu Noguchi, Red Cube, Marine Midland Bank Plaza (now HSBC) at Broadway and Liberty Street, New York,

1968. (Photo by Miwon Kwon.)

public-places mode: “I don’t like doing commissions in the sense that I go and look

at a site and then think of something. Once I have been asked to consider a certain

place where one of my sculptures might possibly be placed, I try to choose some-

thing suitable from what I’ve done or from what I’m about to do. But I don’t sit down

and try to create something especially for it.”8 Whether they were voluptuous ab-

stractions of the human body in bronze or marble, colorful agglomerations of

biomorphic shapes in steel, or fanciful plays on geometric forms in concrete, mod-

ernist public sculptures were conceived as autonomous works of art whose rela-

tionship to the site was at best incidental. Furthermore, just as the conditions of the

site were considered irrelevant in the conception and production of a sculpture (be-

cause they functioned as distractions more than inspirations), so they needed to be

suppressed at the point of reception if the sculpture was to speak forcefully to its

viewers. Again in Moore’s words: “To display sculpture to its best advantage out-

doors, it must be set so that it relates to the sky rather than to trees, a house, people,

or other aspects of its surroundings. Only the sky, miles away, allows us to contrast

infinity with reality, and so we are able to discover the sculptor’s inner scale without

comparison.”9

Thus the central issue preoccupying the artists of such public commissions

(as well as their patrons or sponsors) was the proper placement of the discrete art

work so as to best enhance and showcase its aesthetic qualities. The particular

qualities of the site—in this case we are speaking primarily of the site as a physical,

architectural entity—mattered only to the extent that they posed formal composi-

tional challenges. For the architects involved, the art work was usually considered a

beneficial visual supplement but finally an extraneous element to the integrity of

a building or space. Contrarily, in many artists’ views, the site remained a ground

or pedestal upon which, or against which, the priority of the figure of the art work

would be articulated. Such thinking was predicated on a strict separation between

art and architecture (synonymous with the site) as two autonomous fields of prac-

tice, and it promoted complimentary visual contrast as the defining (formal) rela-

tionship between the two.

By bringing the “best” in contemporary art to a wider audience, by siting

63

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

examples of it in public places, endeavors like the Art-in-Architecture Program of

the GSA, the Art-in-Public-Places Program of the NEA, and the Percent for Art pro-

grams at local and state levels hoped to promote the aesthetic edification of the

American public and to beautify the urban environment.10 Public art works were

meant to play a supplementary but crucial role in the amelioration of what were

perceived to be the ill effects of the repetitive, monotonous, and functionalist style

of modernist architecture. (The inclusion of artists within architectural design teams

for the development of urban spaces in the art-as-public-spaces mode of practice,

our second paradigm, continued to be predicated on the belief that with the artist’s

humanizing influence, the sense of alienation and disaffection engendered by the

inhuman urban landscape of modernism could be rectified.11 Which is to say,

public art at this point was conceived as an antidote to modernist architecture and

urban design.)

With such expectations at play, the art-in-public-places phenomenon had

spread widely across the United States by the late 1970s.12 Art historian Sam Hunter

described the omnipresence of monumental abstract public sculptures in cities

across the country around this time:

In the seventies the triumph of the new public art was firmly secured.

Almost any new corporate or municipal plaza worthy of its name de-

ployed an obligatory large-scale sculpture, usually in a severely geo-

metric, Minimalist style; or where more conservative tastes prevailed

and funds were more generous, one might find instead a recumbent

figure in bronze by Henry Moore or one of Jacques Lipchitz’s mytho-

logical creatures. Today there is scarcely an American city of signifi-

cant size boasting an urban-renewal program that lacks one or more

large, readily identifiable modern sculptures to relieve the familiar

stark vistas of concrete, steel, and glass.13

Despite the initial enthusiasm, as early as the mid 1970s the art-in-public-

places approach began to be criticized for having very little to offer in the way of

64

either aesthetic edification or urban beautification. Many critics and artists argued

that autonomous signature-style art works sited in public places functioned more

like extensions of the museum, advertising individual artists and their accomplish-

ments (and by extension their patrons’ status) rather than making any genuine ges-

tures toward public engagement.14 It was further argued that despite the physical

accessibility, public art remained resolutely inaccessible insofar as the prevalent

style of modernist abstraction remained indecipherable, uninteresting, and mean-

ingless to a general audience. The art work’s seeming indifference to the particular

conditions of the site and/or its proximate audience was reciprocated by the

public’s indifference, even hostility, toward the foreignness of abstract art’s visual

language and toward its aloof and haughty physical presence in public places. In-

stead of a welcome reprieve in the flow of everyday urban life, public art seemed

to be an unwanted imposition completely disengaged from it. Many critics, artists,

and sponsors agreed that, at best, public art was a pleasant visual contrast to the

rationalized regularity of its surroundings, providing a nice decorative effect. At

worst, it was an empty trophy commemorating the powers and riches of the domi-

nant class—a corporate bauble or architectural jewelry. And as the increasing

private corporate sponsorship of public art became associated with the expansion

of corporate real estate developments, pressures increased to rehabilitate the art-

in-public-places programs.15

One of the key solutions to these interconnected problems of public art’s

public relations and its ineffectual influence on the urban environment was the

adoption of site-specific principles for public art. Indeed, it was in reaction to the

glut of ornamental “plop art”16 and the monumental “object-off-the-pedestal”

paradigm that, for instance, the NEA changed its guidelines in 1974 to stipulate,

even if somewhat vaguely, that public art works needed to be “appropriate to the

immediate site.”17 Whereas the program’s initial 1965 goals had been to support in-

dividual artists of exceptional talent and demonstrated ability and to provide the

public with opportunities to experience the best of American contemporary art,

new mandates at all levels of public art sponsorship and funding now stipulated that

the specificities of the site should influence, if not determine, the final artistic out-

65

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

come.18 Thus, despite the numerous pragmatic and bureaucratic difficulties in com-

missioning new art works (certainly it is simpler to purchase existing ones), the

support for site-specific approaches to public art, favoring the creation of unique

and unrepeatable aesthetic responses tailored to specific locations within a city, be-

came fairly quickly institutionalized.19 In the minds of those intimately engaged with

the public art industry at the time, including artists, administrators, and critics, es-

tablishing a direct formal link between the material configuration of the art work

and the existing physical conditions of the site—instead of emphasizing their dis-

connection or autonomy—seemed like a very good idea. Such an approach was

advocated as an important step toward making art works more accessible and so-

cially responsible, that is, more public.

Interestingly, the issue of modernist abstract art’s interpretive (in)accessibil-

ity was defined as a spatial problem by many in the public art field in the late 1970s

and early 1980s. For example, Janet Kardon, the curator of the 1980 exhibition “Ur-

ban Encounters: Art Architecture Audience,” claimed in her catalogue essay:

The way the abstract art work relates to the space of the passer-by is

one key to the negative reception that has become a kind of certifi-

cate of merit among modern artists. . . . It unsettles perceptions and

does not reassure the viewer with an easily shared idea or subject.

. . . Entry [into a work] is facilitated when the public perceives the

work as performing some useful task, whether it is simply that of

shade and seating, or something even remotely associated with the

sense of leisure. To be guided through space in a way that rewards

the passer-by is of prime value to the public.20

A cocontributor to the same exhibition catalogue, Nancy Foote, took the notion of

“entry” more literally, going so far as to say that only site-specific works that “invite

the audience in,” both physically and iconographically, reveal a public commit-

ment.21 Similarly, critics Kate Linker and Lawrence Alloway believed that art that

becomes integrated with the physical site offers the greatest sustainability as

66

well as potential for fluid communication and interaction with a general nonart audi-

ence. According to Linker, “To the absence of a shared iconography, it suggests the

shareable presence of space. . . . Just as use insures relevance, so the appeal to

space as a social experience, communal scope, individual response, may insure a

larger measure of support.”22 In these critics’ writings of the early 1980s, physical

access or entry into an art work is imagined to be equivalent to hermeneutic ac-

cess for the viewer.

The various agencies’ programmatic enforcement of a continuity between

the art work and its site, however, was predicated on a kind of architectural deter-

minism endemic to most urban beautification efforts. Implicit in such thinking was

the belief in an unmediated causal relationship between the aesthetic quality of the

built environment and the quality of social conditions it supported. Consequently,

the type of site specificity stipulated by the NEA, GSA, and other public art agen-

cies was directed toward spatial integration and harmonious design.23 By now,

artists were asked not only to focus on the conditions of the built environment but to

contribute toward the design of unified and coherent urban spaces. This is partly

why, by the end of the 1970s, the NEA endorsed a “wide range of possibilities for

art in public situations”—“any permanent media, including earthworks, environ-

mental art, and non-traditional media, such as artificial lighting.”24 The aim was not

only to accommodate the changing artistic trends of the period but to align public

art more with the production of public amenities and site-oriented projects. What

this amounted to in essence was a mandate for public art to be more like architec-

ture and environmental design.

This integrationist goal was further strengthened when the NEA guidelines

were modified once again in 1982, with the Visual Art and Design programs of the

NEA officially combining their efforts to encourage the collaboration of visual

artists and design professionals. Public art would no longer be just an autonomous

sculpture but would be in some kind of meaningful dialogue with, maybe even coin-

cident with, the surrounding architecture and/or landscape. This approach to site-

specific public art was readily adopted by a group of artists, including Athena

Tacha, Ned Smyth, Andrea Blum, Siah Armajani, Elyn Zimmerman, and Scott Bur-

67

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

68

Nancy Holt, Dark Star Park, Rosslyn, Virginia, 1979–1984. (© Nancy Holt/VAGA, New York.)

ton. Unsatisfied with the decorative function of public art in the earlier model of art-

in-public-places, and excited by the opportunity to pursue their work outside the

confines of museums and galleries at an unprecedented scale and complexity (and

with the expectation of addressing a much larger and broader audience), many

artists were eager to accept, or at least test, the design team directive. Ideally, they

would now share responsibilities on equal footing with architects and urban plan-

ners in making design decisions about public spaces.25

Adopted in the process was a functionalist ethos that prioritized public art’s

use value over its aesthetic value, or measured its aesthetic value in terms of use

value. This shift, predicated on the desire of many artists and public art agencies to

reconcile the division between art and utility—in order to render public art more

accessible, accountable, and relevant to the public—conflated the art work’s use

value, narrowly defined in relation to simple physical needs (such as seating and

shading), with social responsibility. As Rosalyn Deutsche has argued, physical util-

ity was reductively and broadly equated with social benefit with this kind of art, and

“social activity [was] constricted to narrow problem solving so that the provision of

useful objects automatically collapsed into a social good.”26

This collapse was explicit in much public art of the 1980s that followed the

collaborative design team model, and was especially notable in the work and words

of Scott Burton and his supporters.27 Many artists and critics alike seemed to think

that the more an art work disappeared into the site, either by appropriating urban

street furniture (benches and tables, street lamps, manhole covers, fencing) or by

mimicking familiar architectural elements (gateways, columns, floors, walls, stair-

ways, bridges, urban plazas, lobbies, parks), the greater its social value would be.

During the same time, other artists such as Les Levine, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Group

Material, Guerrilla Girls, and Dennis Adams, among many others, were exploring

alternative strategies of adopting existing urban forms as sites of artistic interven-

tion. But their appropriation of different modes of public address, particularly those

of media and advertising, including billboards, newspapers, and television, usually

for the purposes of deconstructing or redirecting their familiar function, did not

garner the same kind of official support within the public art industry until later in

69

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

70

< Lobby of the Wiesner Arts and Media Building at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, by I. M. Pei & Partners. Bench

and railing by Scott Burton, color pattern design on interior walls by Kenneth Noland, exterior plaza paving

design by Richard Fleischner, all 1985. (© Steve Rosenthal; courtesy I. M. Pei & Partners.)

> Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, Federal Plaza, New York, 1981–1989. (Photo by Ann Chauvet; © Richard Serra/Artists

Rights Society (ARS), New York.)

the decade.28 In the meantime, the more an art work abandoned its distinctive look

of “art” to seamlessly assimilate to the site, as defined by the conventions of archi-

tecture and urban design, the more it was hailed as a progressive artistic gesture.

It is against this prevailing definition of site specificity—one of unified and

useful urban design, imagined as a model of social harmony and unity—that

Richard Serra proposed a counterdefinition with his massive, wall-like steel sculp-

ture Tilted Arc. As early as 1980, several years before he was forced to consolidate

his thoughts on site specificity to defend his sculpture for the Federal Plaza site, he

explicitly rejected the then widespread tendency of public sculpture to accommo-

date architectural design. He declared,

There seems to be in this country [United States] right now, espe-

cially in sculpture, a tendency to make work which attends to archi-

tecture. I am not interested in work which is structurally ambiguous,

or in sculpture which satisfies urban design principles. I have always

found that to be not only an aspect of mannerism but a need to rein-

force a status quo of existing aesthetics. . . . I am interested in sculp-

ture which is non-utilitarian, non-functional . . . any use is a misuse.29

Considering such an aggressive statement in light of the GSA’s guidelines of the

same period—“Such [public art] works are intended to be an integral part of the

total architectural design and enhance the building’s environment for the occupants

and the general public”30—it may seem a wonder that Serra was even considered

for the Federal Plaza commission. But the incongruity only reminds us of the dis-

crepancy at the heart of the selection process at this time: that is, the discrepancy

between the values of the committee of art experts, who obviously responded to

Serra’s already established international reputation as an artist, and the criteria

guiding the administrators of the GSA, who deferred to the experts on issues of

artistic merit.

In any case, as critics Rosalyn Deutsche and Douglas Crimp have separately

affirmed, Serra indeed proposed an interruptive and interventionist model of site

72

specificity, quite explicitly opposed to an integrationist or assimilative one.31

Deutsche has argued that public art discourse’s use of the term site specificity to

connote the creation of harmonious spatial totalities is close to a “terminological

abuse,” insofar as site-specific art emerged from “the imperative to interrupt,

rather than secure, the seeming coherence and closure of those spaces [of the art

work’s display].”32 In her view, Tilted Arc reasserted the critical basis of site speci-

ficity, countering its neutralization in the public art of the 1980s. In doing so, it re-

vealed the incompatibility of site specificity with the kind of objectives held by the

GSA.

My concern here, however, is not so much to establish the right definition of

site specificity as to examine the ways in which competing definitions emerge and

operate in the public art field, and to assess their varied artistic, social, and politi-

cal implications and consequences. The terms of Serra’s “critical” or “political” site

specificity,33 in fact, remain more ambiguous than one might expect. This is in large

part due to the emphasis placed on permanence as a fundamental attribute of site

specificity during the Tilted Arc controversy. Serra himself mounted his argument

against the “relocation” of his sculpture on the premise that, first and foremost, site-

specific art has an inviolable physical tie to its site. Hence, to remove the work is to

destroy the work. He insisted throughout and after the controversy that

Tilted Arc was conceived from the start as a site-specific sculpture

and was not meant to be “site-adjusted” or . . . “relocated.” Site-

specific works deal with the environmental components of given

places. The scale, size, and location of site-specific works are deter-

mined by the topography of the site, whether it be urban or land-

scape or architectural enclosure. The works become part of the site

and restructure both conceptually and perceptually the organization

of the site.34

While the insistence on permanence during the court hearings might have

had some legal exigency, the priority given to the issue has obscured certain other

73

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

aspects of Tilted Arc’s site specificity.35 For instance, Serra does seem to prioritize

the physical relationship between the art work and site in comments like the follow-

ing from the same article: “The specificity of site-oriented works means that they

are conceived for, dependent upon, and inseparable from their locations. The

scale, the size, and the placement of sculptural elements result from an analysis of

the particular environmental components of a given context.”36 But he goes on to

say that “the preliminary analysis of a given site takes into consideration not only

formal but also social and political characteristics of the site. Site-specific works in-

variably manifest a judgment about the larger social and political context of which

they are a part.”37

In other words, the site is imagined as a social and political construct as well

as a physical one. More importantly, Serra envisions not a relationship of smooth

continuity between the art work and its site but an antagonistic one in which the art

work performs a proactive interrogation—“manifest[s] a judgment” (presumably

negative)—about the site’s sociopolitical conditions. Indeed, rather than fulfilling an

ameliorative function in relation to the site, Tilted Arc aggressively cut across and

divided it. (No seating, shading, or other physical accommodations here.) In doing

so, as proponents of the sculpture have pointed out, Tilted Arc literalized the social

divisions, exclusions, and fragmentation that manicured and aesthetically tamed

public spaces generally disguise. In destroying the illusion of Federal Plaza as a co-

herent spatial totality, Serra underscored its already dysfunctional status as a public

space.

According to Serra, it is only in working against the given site in this way that

art can resist cooptation.

Works which are built within the contextual frame of governmental,

corporate, educational, and religious institutions run the risk of be-

ing read as tokens of those institutions. . . . Every context has its

frame and its ideological overtones. It is a matter of degree. But there

are sites where it is obvious that an art work is being subordinated to

/ accommodated to / adapted to / subservient to / useful to. . . . In

74

such cases it is necessary to work in opposition to the constraints of

the context so that the work cannot be read as an affirmation of ques-

tionable ideologies and political power. I am not interested in art as

affirmation or complicity.38

Thus, in Serra’s practice, site specificity is constituted as a precise discomposure

between the art work and its site. And this discomposure—which is antithetical both

to the notion of art’s and architecture’s complementary juxtaposition, as in the

art-in-public-places model, and to that of their seamless continuity, as in the art-

as-public-spaces model—is intended to bring into relief the repressed social

contradictions that underlie public spaces, like Federal Plaza, rendering them

perceptible, thus knowable, to the viewing subjects of the sculpture.

It is important to point out at this juncture that, in Serra’s case, this critical

function of site-specific art is directly tied to a critique of the medium-specific con-

cerns of modernist art.39 As Serra explained, “Unlike modernist works that give the

illusion of being autonomous from their surroundings, and which function critically

only in relation to the language of their own medium, site-specific works emphasize

the comparison between two separate languages and can therefore use the lan-

guage of one to criticize the language of the other.”40 So that in addition to working

against the physical and sociopolitical conditions of the site, the art work simulta-

neously addresses the site itself as another medium, an “other language.” Put a little

differently, working against the site coincides with working against the modernist il-

lusion of artistic autonomy. In Serra’s case, the “other” to his own language of sculp-

ture is architecture. And architecture, in turn, serves as the material manifestation of

“questionable ideologies and political power,” which Serra is interested in expos-

ing and subverting. So that in the end, working site-specifically means working

against architecture.41

This is not to say, however, that this “working against” is a straightforward

opposition. Note that Serra never speaks, for instance, of merging sculpture and ar-

chitecture into some new hybrid form to obliterate their categorical distinctions (as

so many contemporary artists are prone to do today in the name of radicalizing

75

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, Federal Plaza, New York, 1981–1989. (© Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New

York; courtesy Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.)

artistic practice). In fact, the question of sculpture has remained central in his prac-

tice over thirty years—not despite but because of the extent to which he has

pressured sculpture to the brink of dissolution. As Hal Foster has written recently,

“with Serra sculpture becomes its deconstruction, its making becomes its unmak-

ing. . . . To deconstruct sculpture is to serve its ‘internal necessity,’ to extend sculp-

ture in relation to process, embodiment, and site is to remain within it.”42 To some

readers, this imperative of serving an “internal necessity” may sound like an onto-

logical quest, if not a modernist one, contrary to Serra’s critique of medium speci-

ficity. But according to Foster, the paradoxical principle of making sculpture through

its unmaking distinguishes a “medium-differential” investigation of the category of

“sculpture” from a medium-specific one. It acknowledges that sculpture is no

longer established in advance or known in certainty, but “must be forever pro-

posed, tested, reworked, and proposed again.”43 Which is to reiterate the point that

Serra’s site specificity addresses not only the particular physical, social, and politi-

cal attributes of a place; it is at the same time engaged in an art-specific inquiry or

critique (or perhaps art discourse is itself a site), proposing, testing, reworking, and

proposing again what sculpture might be. Indeed, for Serra, site specificity has

been both a means to move beyond sculpture and simultaneously a “medium”44

through which to serve its “internal necessity.”

To the opponents of Tilted Arc in the mid 1980s, however, the nuances of

such aesthetic concerns did not matter much. In fact, supportive testimonies to the

importance of this “great work of art,” or advocating the right of the artist to pursue

free expression without governmental interference or censorship, were countered

by resentful commentaries of varying animosity.45 Some regarded the sculpture as

plain, ugly, and brutal, without any artistic merit whatsoever. Some found its pres-

ence on the plaza physically and psychologically oppressive. Few waxed nostalgic

over the past uses of a (falsely remembered) vitally active public plaza (an “oasis of

respite and relaxation”),46 accusing Tilted Arc of destroying this past, of violating a

public amenity.47 A security expert even testified on the ways in which the sculpture

created an impediment to surveillance, encouraging loitering, graffiti, and possible

terrorist bomb attacks.

78

Complaints of this type were presented as the voices of “the people” during

the 1985 hearings, and the government officials in charge of the proceedings pre-

sumed to speak for the public—on behalf of its needs and interests—in their call for

the removal of the sculpture. They characterized Tilted Arc as an arrogant and

highly inappropriate assertion of a private self on public grounds. The sculpture

was viewed, in other words, as another kind of plop art. At the same time, despite

the artist’s ardent efforts to maintain a certain “uselessness” for his sculpture (or

actually because of this), Tilted Arc was instrumentalized by its opponents as a

symbol of the overbearing imposition of the federal government (the sponsor of the

sculpture) in the lives of “ordinary” citizens and “their” spaces. In the end, the re-

moval of Tilted Arc was characterized as tantamount to the reclaiming of public

space by the “community”—narrowly defined as those living or working in the im-

mediate neighborhoods around Federal Plaza.

But as Rosalyn Deutsche has argued, the meaning of key words deployed

during this conflict, such as “use,” “public,” “public use,” and “community,” were

presumed to be self-evident, based on “common sense.” Even those of the left who

supported Tilted Arc did not contest in any effective way the essential and univer-

salizing definitions of these terms—and their ideological uses in the very name of

neutrality and objectivity—as they framed the entire debate.48 In Deutsche’s view,

the opportunity was regrettably missed, both during the hearings and after (espe-

cially with the publication of the documents pertaining to the controversy), to chal-

lenge the authoritarian uses of these terms in the name of “the people,” a tendency

that is not exclusive to right-wing politicians but prevalent in left-informed public

art discourse as well. She has also reminded us that the final decision to remove

Tilted Arc was not a decision against public art in general, for city governments,

corporations, and real estate developers have long understood the benefits of

public art in mobilizing support for redevelopment and gentrification of urban

spaces. Instead, according to Deutsche, Tilted Arc’s removal was a discrediting of a

particular model of public art—or a particular model of site specificity, as I would

insist—one without obvious utilitarian payoffs, one that critically questions rather

79

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

than promotes the fantasies of public space as a unified totality without conflicts or

difference.

While similarly intense debates have accompanied the unveiling of numer-

ous public art works of the past,49 the Tilted Arc incident made most clear that

public art is not simply a matter of giving “public access to the best art of our times

outside museum walls.”50 In fact, much more was riding on the Tilted Arc case than

the fate of a single art work. Unlike prior public art disputes, this controversy, as

one of the most high-profile battlegrounds for the broad-based “culture wars” of

the late 1980s, put to the test the very life of public funding for the arts in the United

States.51 This is why critics like Deutsche have insisted that conflicts such as the one

over Tilted Arc reveal the extent to which public art discourse functions as a site of

political struggle over the meaning of democracy.52

Perhaps recognizing the political stakes more self-consciously than ever,

public art practitioners and administrators engaged in considerable soul-searching

following the Tilted Arc debate, reexamining the fundamental questions of public

art’s goals and procedures. For even if the various testimonies against Tilted Arc

could be dismissed as uninformed populist thinking, or as motivated by corrupt re-

actionary politics, or as simply wrong-headed, some complaints had to be taken

seriously for at least two reasons. First, it was a matter of survival. In the tide of neo-

conservative Republicanism during the 1980s, with the attack on governmental

funding for the arts (the NEA in particular) reaching a hysterical pitch by 1989,

public art programs had to strategically rearticulate their goals and methods in or-

der to avoid the prospect of annihilation or complete privatization (which might

amount to the same thing). Secondly, even those public art professionals most sym-

pathetic to Serra’s cause had to recognize that there was a bit of truth in some of

the criticism. For the point of contestation that mattered most was not so much the

artistic merit of Serra’s sculpture but the exclusionary (and some did say elitist)

commissioning procedures of public art agencies like the GSA and the NEA.

Congressman Theodore Weiss testified against Tilted Arc during the hearings in

these terms:

80

Tilted Arc was imposed upon this neighborhood without discussion,

without prior consultation, without any of the customary dialogue

that one expects between government and its people. The National

Endowment for the Arts panel of three selected the artist and a three

person group from the General Services Administration in Washing-

ton, D.C., approved the design. No one else—not from the commu-

nity or its representatives, not the architects, not even the Regional

Administrators—was ever consulted. These panels, no matter how

expert or how well-intentioned, are not so omnipotent or infallible in

their judgments that they cannot be challenged or improved upon.53

Arguably, the seeds of this argument—that Tilted Arc was absolutely inap-

propriate to the site because the top-down decision-making process, dictated by

small review panels of art experts and bureaucrats, did not involve the members of

the local community—has had the most far-reaching impact on the direction of the

public art discourse of the 1990s. Even before the blowup over Tilted Arc, some

public artists and administrators had recognized that the site of a public art work

had to be imagined beyond its physical attributes. Ideally, the work should engage

the site socially, instigating “community involvement.” But initially, this seems to

have been motivated primarily by the need to forestall potentially hostile reception

of certain public art works. In 1979, for example, when the NEA requested that its

grant recipients provide “methods to insure an informed community response to

the project,”54 the community was still conceived as an inadequately prepared audi-

ence. The community, in other words, needed to be engaged in order to soften

them to the “best art of our time,” to educate them in its proper interpretation and

appreciation (not unlike the way audience groups are commonly treated in

museums).55

But by the late 1980s, and certainly by the time of Tilted Arc’s removal,

“community involvement” meant more. At the bureaucratic level, it meant the ex-

panded inclusion of nonart community representatives in the selection panels and

review committees of public art commissions. More significantly, it suggested a dia-

81

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

logue between the artist and his/her immediate audience, with the possibility of

community participation, even collaboration, in the making of the art work. For

many artists and administrators with long-standing commitments to community-

based practices since the 1960s, or what Suzanne Lacy has retroactively called

“new genre public art,” an intensive engagement with the people of the site, involv-

ing direct communication and interaction over an extended period of time, had

been a well-established tenet of socially responsible and ethically sound public art.

That such a model of public art was marginalized, even denigrated, by the official

public art establishment for over three decades56 must have made the Tilted Arc in-

cident a point of profound ambivalence for many community-oriented practitioners.

Even though some public artists and administrators were traumatized by the Tilted

Arc controversy and its outcome,57 the sculpture’s removal from Federal Plaza, when

viewed as a triumphal rejection of “high art” by “the people,” also signaled an im-

plicit validation of the community-oriented approach to public art.

The discursive emergence of new genre public art in 1989, in fact, coin-

cides with the removal of Tilted Arc,58 and Lacy subsequently refers to the Tilted Arc

case as an occasion “when office workers’ demands to remove the sculpture from

the site in a civic plaza led to calls for greater public accountability by artists.”59

The controversy is cast as an exemplary instance of “the conventions of artistic ex-

pression . . . com[ing] into conflict with public opinion,” with public opinion win-

ning.60 Of course, such a reading of the Tilted Arc incident unquestioningly accepts

the terms of the debate as defined by the sculpture’s opponents. It challenges in-

stead Serra’s critique of conventions of artistic expression as itself conventional. In

the view of many public artists and administrators, Serra did little to complicate, for

instance, the security of individual authorship; in fact, during the hearings, he

seemed to argue for its inviolability against the wishes of “the public.” Moreover,

they saw that Serra’s artistic pursuit, no matter how complex and genuine its critical

engagement with the site and its sociopolitical issues, was still driven primarily by

art-specific concerns that had little bearing on the lives of the people who consti-

tute the actual, rather than abstract or metaphorical, reality of the site. Therefore,

the radicalizing effects of his art work remained narrowly confined to art discourse

82

only, legible to a limited, art-educated audience, appreciated most notably by a

small group of influential voices professionally ensconced in art criticism, art his-

tory, and the museum world.

Indeed, Lacy implicates Serra in such statements as: “Although the move to

exhibit art in public places was a progressive one, the majority of artists accommo-

dated themselves to the established museum system, continuing to focus their at-

tention on art critics and museum-going connoisseurs.”61 Whereas numerous art

experts confirmed the radicality of Tilted Arc’s aesthetic and social critique, then,

those aligned with community-based public art did not find the work radical

enough.62 Insofar as Serra never opens up the creative process to a collaboration or

dialogue with the community (he has in fact disdained the need for art to please its

audience as well as its sponsors), and insofar as the sculpture’s particular form of

criticality coalesces as Serra’s “signature,” his work is held to have no impact on the

hermetic boundaries of the art world and its institutionalized hierarchies of value.

From this point of view, works like Tilted Arc are an unwanted encroachment of art

world values into the spaces of everyday life and people, and an individual’s artistic

concerns are, by definition, antithetical to a socially progressive way of thinking. In

this way, a peculiar alignment developed between the “authoritarian populism”63 of

the right and the community advocacy of the new genre public art type on the left.

Both rejected a certain kind of critical art in the name of “the people.”64

Certainly by the spring of 1986, little over a year after the hearings on Tilted

Arc, the directive to involve the community in the public art process was being

taken more seriously in New York City and elsewhere, with the NEA taking the lead

in 1983 with instructions to include “plans for community involvement, preparation,

and dialogue.”65 So that when it came to choosing an artist for the Percent for Art

commission at the 44th Precinct police station in the South Bronx, John Ahearn was

an “obvious choice” for the selection panel, which now included several nonart

representatives.66 According to Tom Finklepearl, former Director of New York City’s

Percent for Art program, Ahearn “was an obvious choice because he lived close to

the station, enjoyed a good critical reputation, and had already spent many years

interacting with the community. . . . He was well acquainted with the specific nature

83

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

of the community within which the commission was sited, and worked in a figurative

style that is considered accessible.”67 In other words, Ahearn represented the an-

tithesis of Serra; or in Finklepearl’s words, “Ahearn fit the mold for the ‘post-Serra’

artist perfectly.”68

Certainly the differences between the two artists are striking. Serra came

into prominence in the late 1960s, with the emergence of postminimalism and pro-

cess art in particular, as part of the American neo-avant-garde generation. He is

distinguished by art historians and art institutions worldwide as one of the most im-

portant sculptors of the twentieth century. Ahearn found an audience in the very

late 1970s and early 1980s during the rise of the alternative art scenes in the East

Village and the Bronx. He remains biographically linked to the South Bronx and is

modestly self-described as an “itinerant portrait painter.”69

The most significant difference relevant to our discussion, however, is the

fact that whereas Serra intended an aggressively interruptive function for his sculp-

ture on Federal Plaza, Ahearn sought an assimilative one for his at Jerome Avenue.

Ahearn imagined a continuity rather than a rupture between his sculptures and the

social life of the neighborhood where the works were to be displayed and to which

they “belonged.” This is not to say that he did not recognize the potential for conflict

with, specifically, the 44th Precinct police officers. After all, few of them had hoped

for an art work depicting the local police presence as congenial and welcomed. But

Ahearn’s acknowledgment of the police as a key audience group only deepened

his commitment to creating an accurate and humane representation of the site’s re-

ality as he knew it. He wanted to counter the prevalent negative stereotypes of the

Bronx (harbored by the police in particular and promoted by the mass media) as a

place of urban decay and economic devastation, as a dangerous and violent place

infested with drug dealers, criminals, prostitutes, gangs, and disease.70 Instead, he

wanted his work to embody what he called the “South Bronx attitude”71—resilient,

proud, unpretentious, and “real.” In attempting to capture the authenticity of the site

in this way, Ahearn in effect intended a different model of site specificity, a commu-

nity-based realism that countered the example of Serra’s Tilted Arc, which itself was

a counterposition to the art-as-public-spaces model of public art.

84

85

John Ahearn, view of South Bronx Sculpture Park (at 44th Precinct Police Station), with sculptures of Raymond and

Tobey, Daleesha, and Corey, on day of installation, 1991. (© Ari Marcopoulos; courtesy Alexander and Bonin

Gallery, New York.)

86

87

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, casting Hazel Santiago at a Walton Avenue

block party, Bronx, New York, September 3, 1985. (Photo by Ivan Dalla Tana;

courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York.)

Clearly, Ahearn understood that to produce a mural or any other architec-

tural embellishment for the new police station, as was suggested to him at an early

stage of the commission, would be a terrible mistake.72 In fact, it was his decision,

and not that of the Department of Cultural Affairs or the Department of General Ser-

vices (DGS), to work with the dead space of the traffic triangle facing the station

precisely in order to confront the station rather than be part of it. At some level, he

had internalized Serra’s earlier insight that “works which are built within the con-

textual frame of governmental, corporate, educational, and religious institutions run

the risk of being read as tokens of those institutions.”73 But while Ahearn resisted

making his art work a token of various institutions of power, privilege, and author-

ity—the police, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the art world—he actively sought

ways to submit the work to, to put it in service of, the largely African American and

Puerto Rican community of his neighborhood. Ahearn attempted to resist the func-

tion of site-specific public art to support the ideologies and political power of dom-

inant social groups, affirming instead his allegiance to those groups disempowered

and marginalized by these ideologies and power.

The artist’s identification with the local community of blacks and Latinos de-

veloped more or less organically over a decade. Since 1980 Ahearn had been liv-

ing on Walton Avenue between 171st and 172nd streets, just a few blocks from the

traffic triangle. Even as his artistic career ascended through the decade, with exhi-

bitions in “legitimate” art world venues, he maintained the center of his art and life

there in a sixth-floor slum apartment. He produced most of his art directly on the

street: he regularly set up shop on the sidewalk outside his studio, casting portraits

of neighborhood residents, including many children and teenagers, who often con-

tributed comments on how they would like to be represented. By making two

copies of every portrait, one for him to keep and the other to be taken home by the

sitter, Ahearn devised a very specific economy of intimate exchange and local dis-

tribution for his art. Even as he exhibited and sold some of the portraits as fine art

through his SoHo gallery, he also made sure that they became part of the everyday

culture of his neighborhood, proudly displayed by individuals in their living rooms,

bedrooms, kitchens, and dining rooms.

88

In many street casting sessions, he collaborated with Rigoberto (Robert)

Torres,74 an artist from the neighborhood whom Ahearn had met in 1979 after an

exhibition of his relief sculptures at Fashion Moda, an alternative gallery space that

had opened a year before on Third Avenue and 149th Street.75 Between 1981 and

1985, Torres and Ahearn together produced four very popular sculptural murals for

the sides of tenement buildings—We Are Family, Life on Dawson Street, Double

Dutch, and Back to School—that picture quotidian aspects of life in the neighbor-

hood. Even though some art critics judged these wall works and other cast pieces

to be overly sentimental, and even though the artist himself worried at times that

they were too much like folk art, as long as the work made his neighbors “happy,”

Ahearn thought of them as achieving more meaningful and difficult goals than what

is usually expected of an art work. In his words, the “discipline of ‘happy’ is just as

important as the discipline of ‘strong’ or ‘tough,’” and the cast sculptures made to

please a neighbor are “purer than something with too much of myself in it, some-

thing individual.”76

Through sustained years of intimate collaborative exchanges and in situ in-

teractions, Ahearn naturally came to see himself as integral to the culture of the

neighborhood (as many others did). As relayed by Jane Kramer, the author of a

lengthy New Yorker article on this South Bronx project (later published as a book),

the artist believed that with Robert Torres he was “part of what was happening in

the Bronx, part of the integrity of the neighborhood, and solidly at home.”77 Be-

cause of this, the artist saw the site on Jerome Avenue not so much as an abstract

formal entity but as an extension of the community, of which he himself was a part.

Ahearn’s personal history and sense of identity was directly tied to the location. And

this continuity is what made him such an “obvious choice” for the Department of

Cultural Affairs as well as other city agencies and committees, including the Bronx

Community Board Four, which reviewed the maquettes for the project in 1990 and

gave its “community” approval without hesitation.

Yet the attacks against Ahearn and the sculptures that finally led to their re-

moval were exactly on the grounds that neither belonged to the “community,” that

the sculptures were inappropriate for the site. At one end were officials from the

89

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Back to School, installed at Walton Avenue and 172nd Street, Bronx, New York,

1985. (Photo by Ivan Dalla Tana; courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York.)

90

Department of General Services who were overseeing the station building project

as a whole. Arthur Symes, a black architect, who had newly taken on the role of as-

sistant commissioner in charge of design and construction management, and

Claudette LaMelle, a black administrator and executive assistant to the commis-

sioner of the DGS, felt that regardless of his outstanding reputation as an artist and

his track record living and working in the South Bronx, Ahearn, as a white man,

could never understand the experience of the African American “community.” Thus

he had no capacity to represent it accurately for or in the Bronx. They charged that,

in fact, the sculptures were racist.78 On the other end were the complaints of a small

group of residents from an apartment building at the Jerome Avenue traffic triangle,

who found the sculptures an absolute misrepresentation of their community. They

accused Ahearn of glorifying illegitimate members of the community, or “roof

people,” according to Mrs. Salgado, the most vocal opponent of the sculptures. In

their eyes, Ahearn had literally and symbolically elevated the derelict, criminal, and

delinquent elements of the community. They argued that in essence Ahearn pro-

moted the outsider’s view of the Bronx with negative stereotypes (the two male fig-

ures in particular), and that with these sculptures he affirmed the police’s distorted

perceptions of the community, exacerbating the already tense relations with them.

In Ahearn’s view, of course, the three sculptures—of Daleesha, a young

black teenage girl on roller skates; Corey, a large shirtless black man leaning over

a boom box, holding a basketball; and Raymond, a slender Puerto Rican man in a

hooded sweatshirt, squatting next to his pit bull—represented a certain truth about

the neighborhood. Perhaps not a truth that everyone would want to embrace, but an

indigenous truth nonetheless. He found Daleesha, Corey, and Raymond (whom he

knew personally, the last two as friends even) appropriate subjects to commemo-

rate as survivors of the mean streets. He wanted to capture their humanity and

make its beauty visible to the policemen at the 44th Precinct as well as to the neigh-

bors, in the hope of ameliorating the sense of distrust and hostility between them.

As Kramer notes, Ahearn “wanted the police to acknowledge them, and he wanted

the neighbors, seeing them cast in bronze and up on pedestals, to stop and think

about who they were. . . . John wanted them to stand in something of the same rela-

91

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

tion to the precinct policemen that they do to him and the neighbors. They may be

trouble, but they are human, and they are there.”79 Despite Ahearn’s earnest inten-

tions, however, the sculptures provoked anger rather than empathy among many

neighbors.80 In fact, the sculptures were seen as an insult to the community in that

they depicted people most neighbors found menacing, fearsome, and threaten-

ing—the kind of people that they would want police protection from. As Angela Sal-

gado, Mrs. Salgado’s daughter, put it, it was people like Corey and Raymond that

made “the difference between a working-class neighborhood and a ghetto.” As

such, she also charged the sculptures with being “totems of racism.”81

Within the context of early 1990s multiculturalist identity politics and politi-

cal correctness debates (do-good community-based public art is itself a symptom

of this period), such accusations were perhaps too tricky to counter. Ahearn did not

even attempt arguing against them in any systematic or sustained way. Initially he

tried speaking to the few detractors who gathered at the site, especially Mrs. Sal-

gado. He approached her respectfully to have a dialogue—to introduce himself and

his work, and to listen to her. He even repainted Raymond’s face the morning after

installation to have him appear less menacing, less “Halloween,” so that Mrs. Sal-

gado might see “the other Raymond,” “beautiful and heavy.”82 But he could not dis-

suade her from seeing his bronzes as evil and ugly, a “slap in the community’s

face.” In the end, Mrs. Salgado’s objections and his inability to convince her be-

came a measure of the work’s failure for Ahearn.

To the art world, my bronzes were serious, ironic. They had oomph,

they were strong. They were an “artist’s” pieces, and they looked

good at the site, but I thought that day, “They’ll never look like this

again.” I knew that soon they’d look terrible. Bad. Uglier than Mrs.

Salgado said. So I said, “Fuck ’em, the art world!” It’s not my job to

be fighting these conservative progressive people—people like Mrs.

Salgado. I respect these people. It’s not my job to be the punk artist

in the neighborhood—like, there’s a lot going on in my artistic life

besides this installation. There’s my concept of casts in people’s

92

homes—the execution may be shoddy, but to me those casts are

more valuable than a bronze, or a better piece in a collector’s home,

and if I’ve misread my people it means I’ve misread myself and my

concept. . . . What I felt was, I had a choice. . . . Either I was going to

be on Mrs. Salgado’s side or I was going to be her enemy. I refused

that.83

Acknowledging that he had miscalculated the situation, he removed the

sculptures at his own expense five days after their installation. Thus a project that

began as one made with, of, and for the community, by an artist presumed to be an

integral part of that community and approved by a committee of community lead-

ers, was in the end disowned by the community. In a recent interview, Ahearn has

remarked on the nature of the site itself as part of the problem:

In previous times when we installed the wall murals a supportive

community would all come out in strength to view their friends being

hoisted up on the wall. It was a family situation. Whereas the installa-

tion of the bronzes was a little bit removed from the neighborhood

that I lived in, even though it was only four blocks away. It was just far

enough away that it only got a stray group of onlookers that I recog-

nized. Unlike earlier days, the few friends of mine from downtown

that showed up outnumbered the local community, which made me a

bit uneasy. There was a disquiet to the day. Already as the pieces

were unveiled, there were arguments at the site as to the purpose of

the work. That had never happened with the murals. In earlier times,

the murals were seen as a private thing within the community, but

this was instantly understood to be of a citywide, public nature. This

was perceived as a city site. . . . People could tell the difference.

People felt that this had to do with the city, not with their community.84

Of course, the ambiguity of the term “community” is one of the central is-

93

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

sues here. At any one time, depending on who is speaking, the community could be

the people around a few buildings on Walton Avenue, where Ahearn, Daleesha,

Corey, and Raymond are familiar faces; or it could be the group of people living

several blocks away on Jerome Avenue, where Ahearn, Daleesha, Corey, and Ray-

mond are viewed as outsiders; or it could be constituencies delineated by the out-

lines of voting districts; or it might conjure “the Bronx” as an almost mythical place;

or then again, it may not be tied to a geographical area at all but defined instead in

terms of a shared historical and racial background, as was the case with the admin-

istrators at the DGS in their presumption of a singular African American community.

In Ahearn’s case, it is relatively easy to trace these various expectations at

work, both within the artist’s practice and outside it. The rationale behind the selec-

tion of him for the South Bronx commission, as cited earlier, is a case in point. But

the later contestation over Ahearn’s capacity and right to represent the community,

and the accompanying protests against the choice of Daleesha, Corey, and Ray-

mond as representative of the community, are also based on such expectations.

That is, while there may be disagreements among different groups over the specif-

ics, the dominant principle or operative basis of community-based site specificity is

the presumption of a unity of identity between the artist and the community, and be-

tween the community and the art work. Indeed, the commonality of this belief is the

source of the disagreements, as we have seen in Ahearn’s case.

The ambiguity of the term “community,” which is consistent with the discur-

sive slippage around “audience,”85 “site,” and “public,” is itself a distinctive trait of

community-based public art discourse. As such, the claims made of and for the

“community” by artists, curators, administrators, critics, and various audience

groups demand extensive critical analysis. To contribute to that end, I will delineate

here what seems to be the underlying logic of community-based site specificity as

exemplified by Ahearn’s South Bronx project, some aspects of which have been al-

ready outlined in contrast to the site specificity of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc.

As noted earlier, Ahearn, like many other community-based artists, wished

to create a work integrated with the site—a work that would seem to emerge so nat-

urally from a particular place, whose meaning is so specifically linked to it, that it

94

could not be imagined belonging anywhere else. But unlike the physical integration

of the art-as-public-spaces paradigm (which Serra likewise rejected), Ahearn’s

community-based site specificity emphasized a social integration. This is in part

due to the fact that the site itself is here conceived as a social entity, a “community,”

and not simply in terms of environmental or architectural design. But more impor-

tantly, the emphasis on the social stems from the belief that the meaning or value of

the art work does not reside in the object itself but is accrued over time through the

interaction between the artist and the community. This interaction is considered to

be integral to the art work and equal in significance (it may even be thought of as

constituting the art work). What this means is that the artist’s assimilation into a given

community now coincides with the art work’s integration with the site. The prior goal

of integration and harmony in terms of unified urban design is reorganized around

the performative capacity of the artist to become one with the community. And this

“becoming one,” no matter how temporary, is presumed to be a prerequisite for an

artist to be able to speak with, for, and as a legitimate representative or member of

the community. Simultaneously, the characteristics of this “unity” function as criteria

for judging the artistic authenticity and ethical fitness of the art work.

In most cases, community-based site specificity also seeks to bring about

another kind of integration between the community and the work of art. A group of

people previously held at a distance from the artistic process, under abstract desig-

nations of viewer/spectator, audience, or public, are enlisted in this case to partici-

pate in the creation of an art work. Sometimes this absorption of the community into

the artistic process and vice versa is rendered iconographically readable, as, for

example, in the literalist realism of John Ahearn’s cast sculptures. At other times,

when the art work is conceptually oriented, with priority given to the collective pro-

cess and social interaction, with or without the guarantee of any material outcome,

this absorption is more difficult to track. But a central objective of community-based

site specificity is the creation of a work in which members of a community—as

simultaneously viewer/spectator, audience, public, and referential subject—will see

and recognize themselves in the work, not so much in the sense of being critically

implicated but of being affirmatively pictured or validated.

95

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

This investment corresponds to an old imperative of public art: rather than

art works that are separated or detached from the space of the audience, which re-

inforce social alienation and disaffection, one should sponsor works that reassure

the viewing subject with something familiar and known. We can recall Janet Kar-

don’s comment that in order for a public art work to be meaningful to the public

(thus, meaningfully public), it should not “unsettle perceptions” but “reassure the

viewer with an easily shared idea or subject.”86 In 1980, when these words were

written, Kardon encouraged “sharing” through art that either performs a “useful

task,” such as providing shade or seating, or conjures an association with a “sense

of leisure”—generic qualities she presumed to be desired and esteemed by all. In

contrast, proponents of 1990s community-based public art have argued for the

specificity of certain audience groups (i.e., communities), the basic sentiment be-

ing that the desires and needs of a particular community cannot be presumed to be

so generic, and cannot be declared a priori by an artist or anyone else outside of

that community. Therefore, the task of “reassur[ing] the viewer with an easily

shared idea or subject” is best accomplished when the idea or subject of the art

work is determined by the community, or better yet if it is the community itself in

some way.

This principle holds true even in public art projects based in conceptual or

performance art, which do not yield concrete material manifestations (that is, literal

representations of the people of the community). For if we identify “the work” as the

dialogue and collaboration between an artist and a community group, we conjure a

picture of the community nonetheless, albeit in different terms, precisely of work. In

eschewing object (read commodity) production, many community-based artists,

often with the help of curators, administrators, and sponsors, orchestrate situations

in which community participants invest time and energy in a collective project or

process. This investment of labor would seem to secure the participants’ sense of

identification with “the work,” or at least a sense of ownership of it, so that the com-

munity sees itself in “the work” not through an iconic or mimetic identification but

through the recognition of its own labor in the creation of, or becoming of, “the

work.” Although the concept of labor rarely appears in public art discourse, and al-

96

97

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

though the issue cannot be pursued in adequate depth here, it seems crucial to

note the need to consider the representative function of labor within the context of

community-based art practice generally.87 For now, I can simply propose that the

drive toward identificatory unity that propels today’s form of community-based site

specificity is a desire to model or enact unalienated collective labor, predicated on

an idealistic assumption that artistic labor is itself a special form of unalienated la-

bor, or at least provisionally outside of capitalism’s forces.

But if the pursuit of identificatory unity, as I have described it thus far, is in

part an updated means to “reassure the viewer with an easily shared idea or sub-

ject,” the question remains: What exactly is reassured by it? And what does this re-

assurance guarantee? While it is not prudent to overgeneralize, a preliminary

answer, pointing to both the hazards and hopes of contemporary public art, can be-

gin with the observation that the viewer is affirmed in his/her self-knowledge and

world view through the art work’s mechanisms of (self-) identification. Underlying

decades of public art discourse is a presumption that the art work—as object,

event, or process—can fortify the viewing (now producing) subject by protecting it

from the conditions of social alienation, economic fragmentation, and political dis-

enfranchisement that threaten, diminish, exclude, marginalize, contradict, and

otherwise “unsettle” its sense of identity. Alongside this belief is an unspoken

imperative that the art work should affirm rather than disturb the viewer’s sense of

self. A culturally fortified subject, rendered whole and unalienated through an en-

counter or involvement with an art work, is imagined to be a politically empowered

social subject with opportunity (afforded by the art project) and capacity (under-

stood as innate) for artistic self-representation (= political self-determination). It is,

I would argue, the production of such “empowered” subjects, a reversal of the aes-

thetically politicized subjects of the traditional avant-garde, that is the underlying

goal of much community-based, site-specific public art today.88

While the complexities and paradoxes of current public art discourse re-

main unresolved, the need to rethink the operations of the existing models of site

specificity is unambiguous. And the seeming failure of the two most recent

paradigms—as exemplified in Serra’s disruptive model based in sculpture, and

Ahearn’s assimilative model based in community interaction—isolates some of the

terms of that rethinking. Tilted Arc is a seminal instance of a nonassimilative, oppo-

sitional mode of site specificity that, while vilified by many, has been lauded by oth-

ers for its critical capacity to challenge the prevailing tendency of public art to

cover over the many contradictions that underlie public space. John Ahearn’s proj-

ect in the South Bronx, while contrarily an assimilative and integrationist effort, simi-

98

< Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, Federal Plaza, New York, 1981–1989. (Photo by Susan Swidler; © Richard Serra/Artists

Rights Society (ARS), New York.)

> Walton Avenue block party for inauguration of Back to School mural, Bronx, New York, September 3, 1985. (Photo

by Ivan Dalla Tana; courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York.)

99

SIT

ING

S O

F P

UB

LIC

AR

T: IN

TE

GR

AT

ION

VE

RS

US

INT

ER

VE

NT

ION

larly illuminates the conflicted nature of the public sphere. If we are to measure a

public art work’s critical capacity in relation to the ways in which the work itself be-

comes a site of contestation over what constitutes something as public,89 then the

conflicts surrounding these two works underscore the lack of agreement over what

we mean by, and expect from, an “interventionary” site specificity.